[lokken]

The agreement is what is and people can interpret it how they want.

What people forget is that the whole issue of Ascendancy keeping their word is dependent on them overtaking xVx, which doesn't look likely at the present time. Ascendancy's crop simply isn't as good and there is an ever widening deficit to overcome, with limited amounts of time. If people are willing to test our word by the way, I'm entirely welcome to us being put in that position, given our impeccable track record in holding our agreements.

What's far more important is that the BG's seem to have taken this move quite badly, but this is just a natural reaction to the way they opted to play. Ultimately what happened to Ascendancy can all too easily happen to xVx and in the previous situation Ascendancy were looking none to clever as the numbers and the game mechanics (which this round make it impossible* to resist a situation where you're outnumbered) were totally against them. Indeed, it's these game mechanics that the BG's have profited from that are about to backfire on them quite considerably, as highlighted by DLR's substantial loss yesterday.

As I've described there's plenty of mutual benefit around here; I guess if the BG's don't like that so much they need to create a situation to change that.

*Let me explain why it's so staggeringly difficult because I spent a lot of time talking about it but not really saying why. First of all by restricting the strongest ships to low ETA classes, you effectively make the game a situation of 'who has the most ships'. Then of course you remove the ability to allow things like fakes beyond zero fleets and pods only where there is no FA. On top of that by not having strong fleets in all classes, you remove the possibility of having weaknesses in fleets - which thus makes it impossible to tailor fleets to take out your opponent, as everything is focussed on one or two ship classes because they are the only things that are viable. So if there is more of them than of you, beyond getting external help from your galaxy or OOGOOA defence, you are dead. If the game had more depth, alliances would be far more disposed to survive against greater numbers and many of these BG's have my sympathy because they're facing the same horrific cliff face. Unfortunately these stats have reduced this round to bludgeon tactics. So they're shit. But they're no excuse for our underperformance - they just make us look worse.